Buying two recurring memberships on same PayPal account

[jmwalker11]

My question is about having two eMember accounts linked to the same PayPal account for payment. I have multiple families that want to have separate monthly accounts with recurring payments. I also have people who have their own membership and want to purchase a membership as a gift for someone. At the moment when I try to help them purchase another membership using the same PayPal account it just updates the current automatic payment instead of creating a new one.

Can you please inform me on what to do to make this happen?

[admin]

Make the users login to their member account then pay via paypal. When a user is logged into the site, the payment will get applied to that profile.

If the user is not logged into the site then the plugin has no way of knowing the profile so it uses the paypal email address to see if an existing profile is there and applies the payment to that account.

[jmwalker11]

I see. That will work in some cases, but what if the person wanting to purchase the membership is not the person using the membership.

They wouldn’t be able to login because they don’t have the login information in order to make the payment.

Also it doesn’t work for someone who wants to purchase a membership as a gift. How do they do that when the person doesn’t have a user account yet?

Any thoughts on how to get around this? Is there a way when the item is purchased to specific which email address it should be attached to, even if that email might not be setup with a membership yet?

[wzp]

Using the WP eStore Gift Voucher or Certificate AddOn, the “real purchaser” gets a voucher code (which is a 100% coupon), and the recipient redeems it (via a membership purchase) towards the actual membership:

https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/ecommerce/wp-estore-gift-voucher-addon-1687?ap_id=TheAssurer

[jmwalker11]

Thanks WZP. Does this voucher work for a recurring PayPal payment or is it just for a one time purchase? This doesn’t seem to be addressed in the link you sent.

My customer wants to give a gift for a monthly recurring membership that would bill to her PayPal account each month. Can you tell me how this voucher would work in that instance?

[admin]

What you are asking for is not a common practice for subscription. You will easily get a chargeback on the subscription if the actual user (who is using the service) didn’t accept the subscription payment terms during the checkout. You will have nothing to show to the bank/credit card company to defend the chargeback.

This is something I think you should handle manually/separately than the standard checkouts on the site. How many of these will you get (Just a few or many)?

[jmwalker11]

I have two pending at the moment, but I imagine we could get a few of these every couple of months. I’m not sure I understand exactly what you are saying about chargebacks, but if you can tell me how to setup a subscription through PayPal manually I’m happy to give that a try.

What would be important is that the PayPal monthly transaction is linked to the user account so if the person gifting it cancels, the user’s account would be made inactive.

[admin]

If you want a user to pay for a subscription for an account then it needs to be paid by logging into that account period. Thats the best way to handle it (this is how all subscription/membership service handles it).

What I mean by manually handling it is that you can have some steps similar to the following on your site.

1) Share the login with the friend who will pay for the subscription.

2) Your friend can then go to the payments page and pay for subscription for you account.

3) After the payment, change your password.

Then when those few clients ask for it, you can send them to this instructions page.

[Author]

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